Breaking:

Arrest warrants have been issued for 13 people in connection with the alleged CIA-orchestrated kidnapping of a German citizen in the agency’s extraordinary rendition program, a Munich prosecutor said Wednesday.

Prosecutor Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld said the warrants were issued in the last few days. He did not say for whom the warrants were issued, but indicated a statement would be issued later Wednesday. Article

Analysis du jour, and well worth a full read as we’re fast approaching, egged on and hell-bent for leather by the woebegone G. Walker administration, what is perhaps the mother of all crossroads.

History tells us that one of the most unstable political combinations is a country - like the United States today - that tries to be a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist.

[snip]

The combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, an ever growing economic dependence on the military-industrial complex and the making of weaponry, and ruinous military expenses as well as a vast, bloated “defense” budget, not to speak of the creation of a whole second Defense Department (known as the Department of Homeland Security) has been destroying our republican structure of governing in favor of an imperial presidency. By republican structure, of course, I mean the separation of powers and the elaborate checks and balances that the founders of the United States wrote into the constitution as the main bulwarks against dictatorship and tyranny, which they greatly feared.

We Americans are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play - isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy.

[snip]

As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The US attempt to combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical. A country can be democratic or it can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both.

The US political system failed to prevent this combination from developing - and may now be incapable of correcting it. The evidence strongly suggests that the legislative and judicial branches of the US government have become so servile in the presence of the imperial presidency that they have largely lost the ability to respond in a principled and independent manner.… Article

Related:

The US risks being pulled into Iraq’s raging sectarian conflict and has lost the ability to impose its global agenda, one of Britain’s leading think tanks said on Wednesday.

The International Institute of Strategic Studies said that President George W Bush’s push to regain the initiative in Iraq had too few troops and too little support from the government of Nouri al-Maliki.

[snip]

“US power is strong enough to establish an agenda for international activity but is too weak effectively to implement that agenda globally,” said John Chipman, the institute’s chairman. He added that the rest of the world was “strong enough to resist an American agenda” but not to establish an alternative.

[snip]

Mr Cronin added that in current circumstances one of the biggest dangers was the risk that the US would participate in attempts by the Iraqi authorities to clear areas of particular ethnic groups. Article

The full report and ancillary info is here.

Ye old scribe has scant familiarity with the intricacies of the petromarket, but do take a gander, as the allegations are momentous:

Last year was the year that oil prices came close to breaching $80 per barrel. This was despite the fact that there were no significant supply interruptions and oil demand fell in industrialized countries. That raises the question of what caused the spike.

It turns out there is good reason to believe that record oil prices may have been due to our own strategic oil reserve, which the Bush administration may have been manipulating to drive up prices for the benefit of its supporters. This is something Congress must investigate, and here is some preliminary evidence.

[snip]

Over the past month, spot crude oil prices have been tumbling. The reason is that the market has run out of storage capacity, which means that all oil produced must now be immediately sold — and that has driven oil prices down. This suggests there has never been a supply shortage warranting $75 oil, and absent the administration’s dealings, oil prices might not have risen as high as they did.

The story does not end here. With private-sector oil storage capacity exhausted, the president in his State of the Union address has now announced his intention to double the size of the strategic oil reserve from 700 million barrels to 1.5 billion barrels. The Bush administration plans to start purchasing 100,000 barrels of oil per day.

The result has been predictable, with the futures price of oil jumping from $50 to $54 per barrel between Jan. 19 and Jan. 24. Not only will these government purchases increase oil demand, they will also provide new storage capacity needed to re-corner the market.

[snip]

Every price blip in the oil market calls forth explanations in terms of Chinese demand, more violence in Nigeria’s delta region, cold weather, threats from Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, or heightened tensions over Iran’s nuclear program. The strategic reserve is the perfect vehicle for subterfuge corruption because its transactions can be cloaked in the veil of national defense. But a motive exists and the circumstantial evidence is troubling.

Congress must investigate the strategic oil reserve; how it has been managed and what its purpose is. The recently announced expansion serves no real national security function (though that will be the justification) and will only drive up oil prices.

One last factoid. A recent working paper posted by the International Monetary Fund documented that oil prices in the United States appear to be politically manipulated, falling prior to elections. If you are an economist, you ask how that is done. The answer is the strategic oil reserve. Article